Luke 13:10-17
Elizabeth Agassiz did a good thing. She was co-founder and the first president of Radcliffe College, the one-time women’s division of Harvard University. Today, you can find her name attached to a professorship, a building, and a gate at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the successor institution now that the university itself is co-educational.
Elizabeth was also the spouse of the Swiss-born Harvard scholar Louis Agassiz, a much more difficult figure. He joined the Harvard faculty in 1847, and served as a professor and as curator of the school’s Museum of Comparative Zoology until his death in 1873. The Agassiz name is still on the museum building, though it is unclear if it originally honored Louis or he and Elizabeth’s son, Alexander, who succeeded his father as curator.
A bit of a celebrity scientist in his day, Louis Agassiz is now remembered mostly for his work in race science, including his support of polygenism, the long-debunked idea that human races evolved separately. He proposed that God created new and improved human races after each ice age. This supported his belief and the belief of other racists in his day that the white race was unique and superior. In fact, he claimed that the black race had never produced a civilization.
Agassiz also helped establish Harvard as a hotbed of eugenics, the pseudo-science of selective human reproduction embraced by white supremacists from the enslavers of the 19th century to the Nazis of the 20th and even Elon Musk today in the 21st.
In the United States, government policies in support of eugenics resulted in the involuntary sterilization of more that 60,000 individuals, including Carrie Buck, the victim and plaintiff in Buck v. Bell, a 1927 Supreme Court decision that upheld the practice. Buck had been declared feeble-minded and was sterilized after a relative of her foster family raped her. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. infamously wrote in that decision that “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
This toxic history still haunts us, as so many remember state institutionalization as a tool used by the powerful against those deemed inconvenient or dangerous to their privilege. Today, it is human services orthodoxy that involuntary commitment is always wrong, no matter how deadly the consequences.
While pseudo-scientific racism, including eugenics, was used to justify slavery and colonialism, it really reached its gruesome zenith with the Third Reich, and not just in the extermination of Jews, Gypsies, and Queers. The groundwork for later crimes against humanity was laid three years before “The Final Solution” was articulated at the Wannsee Conference of 1942 with what came to be known as Aktion T4, named after Tiergartenstraße 4, the street address of the relevant government office.
Aktion T4 was the systematic murder of Germany’s disabled, ordered by Adolph Hitler in October 1939 and giving the disabled what the Nazis euphemistically called a Gnadentod, a “good death.” Like recent cuts to Medicaid here in the U.S., this freed up money that could be redirected to state violence, and of course, served the cause of eugenics. Over 93,000 beds were emptied in just two years. T4 allowed the Third Reich to perfect the art of mass killing with gas, saving the bullets that had been used in the regime’s earliest crimes against humanity. The gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau used technology developed in Aktion T4.
It was not just the cost and perceived inconvenience of caring for Germany’s most vulnerable. Historically, families have felt moral shame about disability, England’s “lost” Prince John at the start of the last century and Rosemary Kennedy during our own lifetimes.
In the pre-scientific age in which Jesus lived, people made up causes for things that seemed inexplicable. Sadly, some Christians still do, despite scientific advances. God does not send hurricanes to punish the nation for LGBTQ+ equality, something that doesn’t even make sense in the twisted logic of evangelicals, as the hurricanes tend to hit the states that are most hostile to equality. “Don’t say gay” offered exactly zero protection to Florida, though they have doubled down on hate with “Alligator Auschwitz.”
God does not cause a child to be born blind because his father is a sinner. Epilepsy and spinal deformity are not caused by demonic possession.
Under the cleanliness code of the Temple Cult, individuals with a disability were considered unclean, excluded from the rites and worship of the community.
The lectionary wants us to wrestle with today’s gospel as a question of sabbath violation. But we already know that Jesus appeals to the spirit of the law, beyond the letter of the law. Jesus reminds us that the sabbath was created to benefit humans, not the other way around. Unfortunately, and all too often, this dispute about sabbath and similar disputes have been framed as Jesus versus the Jews, an approach that is not only nonsensical, since Jesus only ever understood himself as a Jew, but that has also contributed to centuries of Christian antisemitism.
Instead, I’d like to focus on restoration and inclusion, for practicing sabbath is a mark of privilege in end-stage Neo-Liberal capitalism, and law is meaningless when law enforcers are law breakers.
We were being spoon-fed tales straight from Horatio Alger novels before we even had teeth. Alger was a student at Harvard College in the age of Agassiz, studied at my alma mater, the university’s Divinity School, and went on to serve briefly as a Unitarian minister before being brought down by his then still taboo homosexuality. He would become famous as a young adult novelist, crafting tale of young boys, poor but plucky, who worked hard and achieved comfortable middle class lives.
The first of these iconic tales was “Ragged Dick,” his fourth and first successful novel, published in 1867. He would write more than a hundred additional books using the same formula, though a trip to the West Coast inspired him to include that location as a setting in later novels.
Most of us are still coded to believe that anyone can work hard and “pull themselves up by the bootstraps.” The corollary, seldom spoken, is that many of those who struggle, especially the addicted and indicted, must have made bad decisions, must be lazy, or in a strikingly pre-historic mode, that it must be multi-generational disfunction, like a petty god who punishes one generation after another. “Go, and sin no more” we say like some latter-day Jesus, even when we have failed to provide the healing and restoration Jesus provided.
This is the American narrative. Billionaires do not want us to teach history for fear we might learn how the rich really became rich.
We know, intellectually, sometimes compassionately, that many of the least among us did absolutely nothing to land at the margins, from the rubble of Gaza to the streets of Elmira. Racism, still as real today as when Louis Agassiz was singing the song of the enslavers, prevents many from receiving the just reward for their effort and talent. Never mind misogyny and countless other forms of hate.
Changes to your gut biome can lead to depression, and what does your gut biome look like when you live in a food desert and only have access to the ultra-processed food at the local dollar store?
Influenza during pregnancy increases the risk that the child will develop schizophrenia as a young adult. Getting strep as an older adult can lead to hoarding. Never mind the folks who became addicted and subsequently mentally ill as the Sackler Family fueled the opioid epidemic for their personal profit, or the millions of Americans bankrupted every year by a system where we insanely reward the people who deny us the healthcare we need.
Like Jesus, we are called to restore those society sees as rightly excluded, as unclean. We are meant to heal where we can, and even when we can’t, to be at the table with the prostitutes and tax collectors, with the unclean and the judged.
That isn’t always easy, for while many claim Christianity, America’s real religion is the cult of Ayn Rand and Horatio Alger. “America First” is just nationalized sociopathy, and our billionaires almost always got there through crime, exploitation, and sin. How many independent bookstores did Jeff Bezos destroy? How many small tech companies did Bill Gates mow down? This wasn’t just smarts. It was often predatory and even criminal behavior.
It is not easy, to suspend judgment when someone is unlike us, to say “You are welcome at this table.” We do a remarkable job here at The Park Church, but I wonder what more we might do, individually and collectively, to heal and to restore. It seems a monumental task. And yet that is our call, to treat everyone with dignity, to treat everyone as a miracle, a child of that holy mystery and source we call God. To feed the hungry, to bind up the wounds, to love just as we are loved, to judge not, lest we be judged.
I wonder if I, if we, might take on more step this day on that Way, the Way of Jesus, the Way of Life. Amen.